Lazy Bones (30 page)

'The place is fal ing to pieces, basical y,' she said. 'We can only put so much weight on the floors, the filing cabinets have to go against certain wal s and nothing's level. You can find your chair rol ing from one side of the office to the other, if you're not careful...'

Thorne and Hol and smiled politely, unsure as to whether or not she'd finished. After a few seconds, she shrugged and raised an eyebrow to indicate that she was waiting for them. , The only sound in the room came from a noisy, metal fan whicl looked like it might have been an antique itself. At the other end of the desk, an entire army of gonks, action figures and soft toys was lined up across the top edge of a grimy, beige computer.

'You spoke to DCI Brigstocke on the phone,' Thorne said. He raised his voice a little to make himself clearly heard above the fan. 'Mark and Sarah Foley?'

Lesser reached for a piece of paper on her desk and studied it. '1976,' Hol and added, trying to move things along.

'Right, wel , I'm sure you weren't expecting it to be straightforward...' She looked up and across at them, smiling. Thorne couldn't quite manage one in return. 'Al I can real y tel you with any certainty is that they were never fostered by anybody who is stil registered with us as an active carer.'

Hol and shrugged. 'I suppose it would have been too much to hope for...'

253

'Right,' Thorne said. He had been hoping nevertheless.

'We're talking over twenty-five years ago,' Lesser said. 'It's possible that the people who fostered them are stil active, but have moved to another area.'

'How do we check that?' Thorne said.

She shook her head. 'Not a clue. It's pretty unlikely anyway, I'm just thinking aloud, real y...'

Thorne could feel a headache starting to build. He shuffled his chair a little closer to the desk, pointed to the fan. 'I'm sorry, could we . . .?'

She leaned across and switched the fan off.

'Thanks,' Thorne said. 'We'l try to get through this as fast as we can. Why was what you told us the only thing you could tel us with any certainty?'

'Because the only files I have access to here are current. Those are

the ones concerned with active carers.'

'That's the stuff on computer?'

She snorted. 'It wasn't antil ten years ago that things even started being typed, and even now there's dril a load of stuff that's handwritten. It's not just the building that's past it...'

Thorne blinked slowly. It was just his luck to need help from an organisation whose systems were even more fucked up than the ones he worked with every day.

'But there are records, in one form or another, that go back further...'

'In one form or another, I suppose so. God knows what state they'l be in if you manage to lay your hands on them, a few scribbled pages nearly thirty years old. Hang on, some are on microfiche, I think...'

Thorne tried not to sound too impatient. 'There are records though?'

'Dead files...'

'Right, and the dead files, the files that would have the records from the mid-seventies, wil be stored somewhere?'

254

'Yeah, they should be in Chelmsford, at County Hal . The law says we have to keep them.'

Hol and muttered. 'Data Protection Act...'

'That's it. Everybody who's received a service from us has a right to see their records, to have access. Some people wait years. They come back in their forties or fifties, looking for details on people who fostered them when they were kids.'

'How come it takes them so long?' Hol and said.

'Maybe it's the distance that makes them appreciate it. At the time, when they're kids, it can be a bit traumatic...'

Thorne thought about Mark and Sarah Foley. Anything they went through as foster children could not possibly have been more traumatic than what had happened before. 'What do you tel them?' he asked. 'These people that come looking.'

'Good luck.' She leaned back on her chair, took the material of her blouse between thumb and forefinger and pul ed it from her skin. She flapped it back and forth, blew down on to her chest. 'We've got the records, but I couldn't real y tel you where. Like I said, they should be over at County Hal , but laying your hands on them is another matter.'

Joanne Lesser smiled a nothing I can do smile and Thorne remembered a similar moment: he and Hol and sitting in almost identical positions in Tracy Lenahan's office at Derby Prison.

It seemed like a long time back. A few deaths ago...

Thorne rol ed his head around on his neck. 'I know that we're talking about stuff that dates back a long way and you've made it clear that the system's not al it should be, but surely there's some sort of central storage place...?'

'Sorry, I thought I'd explained. We only have the active files because each time you move, each time the office relocates, you leave the dead files behind. Now, in theory, they should get taken back to County Hal and, like you say, stored somewhere. In reality, stuff just gets chucked in boxes. It goes missing...'

255

'Why would you move?'

'Council buildings are interchangeable. Somebody could decide tomorrow that this should be the new headquarters for the DSS or Refuse Col ection. Unless the council renews the lease, this place might be a hotel in a couple of years.'

'Right. So, have you moved often?'

'I've only been doing this ten years and we've moved three - no, four - times since I started.' Thorne had to fight quite hard to stop himself swearing, or kicking a hole in the front of the desk. 'It gets worse. I know that some stuff got destroyed a couple of years ago when part of the archive was flooded...'

Thorne and Hol and exchanged a glance. They were catching every red light...

'What about school records?' Lesser said. 'You might have more luck . . .'

Hol and glanced down at his notebook. 'They attended local primary and secondary schools until 1984, after which there's no record of them.'

She considered this. 'Are you sure they're stil alive?'

'We're not real y sure about anything,' Thorne said. In truth, the idea that Mark and Sarah Foley might be dead was something that had been only briefly considered. It had even been suggested that the suicide of Dennis Foley might have been a second murder made to look like a suicide. That whoever had been responsible might have wanted the children dead too.

Half an hour spent looking at the files on the original case, at the post-mortem report on Dennis Foley, had soon put paid to that clever theory.

'This is probably clutching at straws,' Hol and said, 'but I don't suppose there's anybody stil working here, in your department, who was around back in 1976?'

'Sorry. Staff tend to move around as often as the offices do.'

'A bit like footbal ers,' Hol and said.

'I wish we got paid as much.' Thorne thought the smile she gave

256

Hol and was of an altogether different sort from the one she'd given him.

Thorne shifted on his chair. It was enough to drag Hol and's eye

from Joanne Lesser back to him. Time to go.

'Right, wel , thanks...'

'It's a long way back,' she said.

Hol and reached for his jacket. 'There shouldn't be too much traffic at this time of the day...'

'No, I meant you're going back a long way. To look for these people, for Mark and Sarah Foley. I mean, what about National Insurance? DVLA? Sorry, I don't want to teach my grandmother to suck eggs, but...'

'It's OK,' Thorne said.

She leaned forward in her chair. 'Why do you want to find them?'

Hol and stuffed his notebook away. 'I'm sorry, but we can't real y...'

Thorne cut him off. What did it matter? 'They were fostered after their parents died. Their father kil ed their mother and then himself. The children discovered the bodies.' Lesser's lower jaw sagged a little. 'We think that what happened back then is connected with a series of murders that we're investigating now.'

'A series?' She spoke it like it was a magic word.

'Yes.'

'They're connected to it, you mean? Mark and Sarah Foley?'

Thorne could see a flush developing at the top of her chest. Her voice was suddenly a little higher. She was excited.

Thorne stood up and began pul ing on his leather jacket. 'Listen, Joanne, we'l be sending someone down to County Hal to start looking for these records. I'm sure you're busy, but we'd be very grateful if you could give him as much help as you can...'

She rol ed her chair back and stood too. 'You don't need to send anyone. I'd be happy to do it for you. I mean, yes, I am pretty busy, but I can find the time.' The flush had moved up to the base of her

257

throat. 'I'l probably be quicker on my own, to be honest. You know, without somebody else getting in the way...'

Thorne thought about her offer. It sounded like such a wild-goose chas'e that he'd probably only be wasting an officer anyway. He nodded. 'Thanks.'

At the door, while Hol and took down Lesser's phone number and handed her a card, Thorne stared at the posters on the wal next to the door. One image in particular caught his eye: a girl and a boy, hand in hand, staring straight at the camera, their moist, round eyes begging. They were much younger than Mark and Sarah Foley would have been, no bigger than toddlers, and they were almost certainly actors. Stil , their faces held Thorne's attention...

He tensed a little when he felt Lesser's hand on his arm.

'It's funny,' she said, 'to think that people can. just slip through the net like that, isn't it?'

Thorne nodded, thinking that some people were a lot more slippery than others.

Driving back through the town centre, Hol and talked about Joanne Lesser. He joked about the sort of woman who looked like she wouldn't say boo to a goose and then went home and lay in the bath, one hand holding some gruesome true-crime book, while the other...

Thorne wasn't paying too much attention. He felt as though someone had poured concrete in through his ears. The thoughts floundered in his head, sticky and dismal, while his face, as always, was easy to read.

'Like she said, we were going a long way back,' Hol and said. 'Probably wasting our time. We'l find them somewhere else...'

Thorne grunted. Hol and was right, but al the same, he had been counting on something a bit more positive. Hol and made for the motorway, heading out of town along the 258

line of the Roman wal . From here at St Mary's of the Wal , during the English Civil War, a vast Royalist cannon named Humpty Dumpty was said to have fal en, later to be immortalised in the children's nursery rhyme. They passed the ancient entrance to the town, through which Claudius, the invading Emperor, had once ridden into Colchester on the back of an elephant.

Thorne found it strange that two thousand years later, whether by accident or design, the far more recent history of ordinary people could be so impenetrable.

'I'm betting Miss Marple back there's already rootling through her dead files,' Hol and said. He laughed, and Thorne dredged up something that might have been a smile, if one half of his face had been paralysed. 'What d'you reckon?'

Thorne reckoned that he'd been right about chasing leads. This one had sounded solid, like it wasn't going anywhere. Now it had put on a burst of speed and Thorne felt as if he could do nothing but watch it disappear into the distance.

The slice of white bread in Peter Foley's hand was blackened with dabs of newsprint from his fingers. He looked at his hands. There were stil scabs on a couple of the knuckles, and oil beneath his fingernails from where he'd spent the morning tinkering with his motorbike. He used the bread to mop up the last of his gravy, then picked up his mug of tea and leaned back against the red, plastic banquette.

He stared out of the care window and watched the cars drift by. He

thought about his family. The dead and the disappeared. Bumming around...

That's what he'd told those fuckers, when they'd asked what he was doing back when it had happened, and it was pretty much al he'd done since as wel . Holding down a job, once he'd got back into the swing of things, had become difficult. He'd developed a tendency to take things the wrong way, to react badly to a tasteless comment or a 259

funny look. He couldn't say for sure that what had happened was responsible. He might always have been destined to be a shiftless loser with a tendency towards casual violence, but what the luck, it

was comforting to have something to blame.

To have somebody to blame.

He should have moved away from the area. There was always some old dear with an opinion, or a pair of young mums whispering and shielding their children. Always some interfering fucker, wil ing to tel any woman he got close to al about his happy family. People had good memories. Not as good as his, though...

He remembered the argument he'd had with Den a couple of days before it had happened. He'd wanted to come round, had asked Den why nobody had seen Jane for a while, if everything was al right. Den had lost it and told him to mind his own business, said that he knew very wel what was going on. He remembered his brother's face, the trembling around the mouth as he'd accused him of fancying Jane, al but suggesting they'd been screwing behind his back. He remembered the guilt he'd felt, tlen and afterwards, because he did fancy Jane and always had.

And he remembered the faces of the children, the last time he'd seen them, before that cow from the social services had driven them away. Sarah had been quiet, she'd probably not real y understood what was going on, but the boy's face, Marte's face, pressed against the back window of that car, had been streaked with snot and tears.

He slid out of the booth, grabbed his paper, and strol ed across to the counter to pay for his lunch.

He thought about his nephew and his niece and hoped that they were together somewhere a long way away. A place where nobody could ever find them and fuck their new lives up.

The afternoon stretched ahead. He would go back and lie down and wait for it to get dark. Then he would put some metal on, and drink. He would empty can after can, until the noise inside his head